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MySpace Adds Microsoft Support for Windows Mobile and Silverlight Posted: 30 Mar 2009 09:38 AM PDT Lots of Microsoft support coming from MySpace today. Announced at the CTIA Wireless 2009 conference as well as the Web 2.0 Expo that will be going on in Las Vegas and San Fransico respectively, Microsoft Windows Mobile as well as Microsoft Silverlight are both supported by MySpace. The added support extends MySpace’s mobile accessibility as well as the potential for more MySpace OpenSocial applications from developers and third parties. MySpace has actually partnered with Microsoft to set up the new offerings. While the Windows Mobile 6.1 support won’t be available until later on this summer, the application will be better optimized for a friendlier user interface with improved options for direct delivery of MySpace-related content. Several of MySpace’s main social features are to be tied in with the Windows operating system itself, for better accessibility and media-sharing options for users on the go. Not surprisingly, the MySpace application will be a default app for certain mobile devices such as LGs, which come pre-loaded with Windows Mobile. With tightly integrated partnerships and feature settings, the roll-out for MySpace Mobile over Windows Mobile 6.1 devices is large and will be a prominent initiative for MySpace during the second half of this year. The mobile industry is becoming far more aware of socially integrated applications overall, with a great deal of developer support and cooperation coming from nearly every facet of the mobile industry. It’s increasingly important for the platform approach to become as useful as possible for the benefit of all that are involved, enabling many social networks to become more competitive on a global scale. While the mobile sector of MySpace’s growth has been important for years now, the open platform options have been a newer focus for the company and an area where it has been lagging behind Facebook for some time. So a partnership with Silverlight is yet another way in which MySpace is looking to increase its offerings to the developer community under the guise of more flexibility for OpenSocial applications. For Microsoft, this means that its own platform approach to supporting the larger virtues of online and mobile social networking are being addressed. While a large investment in Facebook las year indicated that Microsoft may be interested in acquiring MySpace’s competitor Facebook, the necessity for enabling its existing products for wide use is still an important goal for Microsoft. Nevertheless, Microsoft has been strengthening its relationship with Facebook, which already has support for several of Microsoft’s products including Windows Live. But these latest announcements from MySpace reflect the social network’s dedication to the mobile sector and the ongoing efforts to compete in the open platform space as well.

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How To Develop A Vision That Will Make You Millions Posted: 27 Mar 2009 01:25 PM PDT Are you working at a job where there is no end in sight? Has all the economic doom and gloom got you down? Have you ever started project only to start ten more and never get a single one of them complete? I’m happy to say that there is always a way to get through the confusion, to get past the pessimism, and to develop a vision which will succeed regardless of external forces that are out of your control. You may be wondering why I’m talking like this since this is not a site typically meant for distributing motivational speeches. Let me give you a little background and then I’ll explain why I’m writing this, and how to get past all of the hurdles facing you to accomplish things you never dreamed possible. The Curse Of The Shiny Object Back at the beginning of the year, I wrote a post titled “The Curse of the Shiny Object“. In the post I explained how I had personally lost sight of my vision after years of striving to accomplish something which had no end goal. In the post I described the “shiny object” as the hope for “some technology [that] will come about [and] will solve all of our problems.” It’s a great concept but unfortunately those shiny objects can make us lose site of our vision. I had this “realization” back in January and decided to set a new vision which was “success through social media“. Within weeks a new idea popped into my head that was perfectly aligned with my vision and as I have done before I decided to pursue it. Less than 3 months later I am happy to say that the idea has materialized and will become a reality within a week or so. So if you are wondering why I have been absent from this blog recently, this is why. I wanted to share with you all a quick story about how I got here before telling you a little bit about what’s to come. Think And Grow Rich I rarely share with readers how I got to this point in my life but I figured now would be a good time because as I read more depressing news I am frequently reminded of how easy it is to lose site and drift away from your vision. I will try to keep this as short as possible because this site is truly about social media, not about the story of Nick O’Neill ;). In 2000 I graduated high school and went to Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. The reason I decided to attend the school was because it was furthest away from my home and the postcard that came in the mail looked nice. Within three quarters (yes, the school has quarters due to their Co-Op program) I had left the school due to a bunch of bad decisions which I’ll refrain from sharing in this post. Days before I left the school, I confided with my friends at the time that I was going to turn my life around. I pledged that I would learn guitar, start going to the gym, and create a new company. Shortly after returning I ended up going on a binge of self-help books, the first of which was “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. Eventually I had accomplished all the goals I had set and it was thanks to the lessons learned in the book. If you haven’t read it then I highly suggest you do because this single book combined with my decision to change my life, completely turned everything around. Think and Grow Rich is also the book from which all self-help and motivational business books have been developed. Developing That Vision In “Think and Grow Rich”, Napoleon Hill discusses a lot of things but the most important takeaway is that you must cultivate a burning desire, have strong faith, use autosuggestion, and develop persistence to attain any goal. The goal that you set is your vision and no matter what you do you must hold tight to that vision. A good friend of mine, Gary Vaynerchuk has the lofty goal of acquiring the New York Jets, and while some may laugh at the idea of Gary Vaynerchuk owning the Jets, he has no doubt that it will take place. That’s all that matters. We hear it daily, right now is “the worst economy in the United States since the Great Depression”. Everyday the media shoves that idea down our throats until it’s engrained in our subconscious. Honestly I don’t give a shit what the media tells me everyday and you shouldn’t either because there is something that you can use to beat all the negativity that surrounds us daily: your vision. If you pursue your vision passionately and hold tight to it, nobody can beat you. It should be your job and your mission to protect your vision at any cost (aside from the welfare of your family and your health). Everyday I have people tell me that launching a new business in the middle of economic turmoil is insane and while they may turn out to be right, there’s only one thing that matters: the vision. For you, your vision should be the only thing that matters. Reaching Your Goals So I think I’ve gotten the point across: you need to develop a vision. If you ever begin to question your vision, shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to talk with you about it. The next step is taking the steps to reach your vision and for me that vision has been to develop a way to teach others about success through social media. While I can’t give you all the details about what I (and a business partner) will be launching in the coming days, I can say that this is the biggest announcement that I have personally ever made and I’m extremely excited about it. Each risk I’ve taken over the past 8 years since I left Northeastern University has taught me a valuable lesson (even if it resulted in failure) and I have accumulated all of those lessons (combined with my business partner’s lessons) into what I believe will be a priceless product. I also hope that this product will help you, your friends, or professional connections to build a thriving business no matter what the economy brings your way. This is only the beginning of developing a vision that started back in January but I hope that some of you have the opportunity to participate and that we can all learn through the experience. Back in February I let you know that a new business launch was only four weeks away but as usual it took a little more time than expected. Regardless, we are now days away from launch and I want you to be the first to know about it. If you are looking for a way that your business can survive these challenging times then fill out the form below and be the first to find out within the coming days. We will be notifying all subscribers before making a formal announcement on this site and elsewhere so be sure to subscribe below! Newsletter Name:   Email:   We will never share your email with anybody else and will never use your email to spam you with offers.

Whrrl Mobilizes More with SMS and Wireless Digital Camera Support Posted: 27 Mar 2009 10:59 AM PDT Earlier this month Pelago’s mobile service Whrrl launched an updated version at the SXSW conference in Austin, TX. Today, the company is revealing some useful enhancements to Whrrl v2.0, with SMS and email integration along with digital camera functionality. You may recall that Whrrl is a mobile-to-web service that enables users to create collaborative stories around a particular event, contributing content through photos, videos and more. With location-based capabilities and an inherent community that can be built up around these collaborative events. With the new SMS and email support, more users can become much more mobile with their ability to add to a Whrrl story. Just as Twitter has a broad appeal with its simplistic text-message format for sending in updates, Whrrl too can expand the types of mobile users that can add to a Whrrl story. The added email support also simplifies the story-telling ability of a given contributor. A partnership with Eye-Fi is also providing means for direct digital camera photo upload to Whrrl stories. As the Eye-Fi service pulls photos from your digital camera wirelessly, the process for adding photos to your computer, then to a photo-hosting provider and onto Whrrl has been collapsed into an automatic updating process. With this option photos can be uploaded in real-time. Eye-fi is simplifying and mobilizing unconnected digital cameras to a large extent and I imagine that a number of other services will continue to look to this third party solution for more hands-off approaches to media-sharing as Whrrl has done. To see a short video interview we did with Whrrl, see below.

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MySpace Now Pronounces You Man and Wife Posted: 25 Mar 2009 01:16 PM PDT Married on MySpace. It’s got alliteration, but does it have your vote of confidence? In partnership with Endemol, the production company behind a number of reality shows made for television and the web, MySpace is taking vows to give users the wedding of their dreams. The new interactive online series is set to air in May, with 13 episodes and a live wedding ceremony concluding the show in August, but submissions for the show open up today. The deadline is April 17th and the finalists for Married on MySpace will be announced on April 24th. Similar to wedding shows seen on morning news programs or the Lifetime Network, its the viewers (in this case, MySpace users) that determine which lucky couple will get an all-expenses-paid wedding. And it’s not just the couple that MySpace users get to choose. The attire, bachelor and bachelorette parties and wedding location will also be selected by MySpace users, making this a truely interactive series made for an online community. Voting will take place for two wedding elements each week leading up to the nuptials. Talk about crowd sourcing. In addition to having MySpace users picking some of the major wedding-related events, the whole thing will be chronicled and featured on MySpace, with its very own video channel. A series profile page will also give spotlights to exclusive content like profiles of the wedding party, behind the scenes footage and blogs from the couple. So has the wedding reality phenomonon gotten out of hand when we turn to MySpace for entertainment? A number of cross-promotional partners and sponsors don’t seem to think so. The Knot is an editorial content sponsor and will be providing wedding and style experts to help plan the wedding. Additional content from The Knot’s application, My Inner Bride, will also allow MySpace users to create bride avatars and further engage themselves in this unique online event. Another sponsor, Touchstone Pictures’ “The Proposal,” makes the Married on MySpace series look like a well integrated marketing ploy, but I don’t think that will matter much once the entertainment value of a social network’s users deciding the fate of one couple’s wedded bliss. It looks like this is the next step in content distribution and marketing on MySpace, merely emphasizing MySpace’s larger initiatives to diversify the very meaning of a social network as the company becomes more media-centric from a creation standpoint.

Do Branded Communities Really Work? Posted: 25 Mar 2009 11:25 AM PDT You hear all the time that brands leveraging communities online are great ways to increase brand recognition. A new report from Powered, a social marketing company, has released its findings that support these claims. Conducted along with Next Century Media Global, the annual report shows that the return on investment for social marketing online delivers an average of $60 for every $1 invested. That’s a 10% increase from 2006. The ROI Report and Benchmark for Social Marketing is specific to companies backed by Powered, so the findings are very narrow and can’t be fully applied across the board. But the report iself does bring up some interesting points to consider as marketers and online communities look to better engage users, especially for branding purposes. Powered questioned social network users and found that about 66% of respondents sated they were more likely to purchase products and/or services as a direct result of the learning process offered in a branded community, as well as stating that their overall perception of the brand improved based on the community. As far as brand loyalty goes, about 63% of respondents stated that they had a more ongoing positive opinion of the brand after interacting with the community. What’s that mean for brands? Creating branded online environments can pay off. While a correlation has been proven by Powered as a result of its own marketing offerings, the causal relationship of brand recognition and consumer interaction could be left to a great many factors. The very act of seeing a brand reach out to consumers online could help improve the perception of that brand. The ability to interact with other consumers, even in a branded community environment, still takes advantage of an open forum approach that enhances any material a brand may be pushing out to consumers. The common thread here is still the fact that much of the power lays in the hands of the consumers. As long as the consumers feel as though they are in control of the content and the online experience, brands have a better opportunity of engaging these consumers and disseminating information. The concepts brought to light through Powered’s study can be applied to stand-alone communities or even applications that operate within the realms of a larger social network such as Facebook. As we saw yesterday with BLiNQ’s study, the ability to engage consumers in such online environments is a necessary and useful step that brands and marketers can take for moving their brand forward.

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Are You Interested Launches Location Based Dating for the iPhone Posted: 23 Mar 2009 09:03 AM PDT Are you interested in location-based hook ups? SNAP Interactive, the company behind the Are You Interested application on Facebook, is going mobile with its new app that’s now available for iPhone users (get it here). With over 12 million monthly active users on its Facebook application, SNAP is looking to convert a lot of those users to the mobile realm, giving a new meaning to instant gratification. Features for the Are You Interested iPhone application include photo browsing of singles in your area, photo ratings, matches, and contact options via winks and private messages. The most notable use of the Are You Interested mobile app is the ability to see and meet singles that are currently online and in the area.

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Feed Standardization Will Commoditize Feed Aggregation, So Let’s Create The Semantic Web! Posted: 20 Mar 2009 12:12 PM PDT Below is some of my personal theory on the semantic web and feed aggregation. Please excuse the rambling :). As companies race to effectively aggregate our content an interesting thing is taking place: suddenly an aggregation of all our web-based activities are available via multiple sites on the web. Personally, I have information aggregated at MyBloglog, FriendFeed, Facebook, and many of my activities also show up on Twitter. So with this information everywhere where’s the value add? At one point, aggregation services that found you news or information related to your friends provided a valuable service, incentivizing you to return to the site in order to get the latest information about what’s going on in your world. Unfortunately, much of that information in now aggregated all over the web and the aggregation service is no longer the core value. Instead the core value is the automated filtering of that information. If you have the best filter, then users will come back to you. Take Techmeme for example. The site aggregates the latest technology news that it believes is most relevant to the readers and most important for the readers to know. It’s partially automatic and partially manual. Basic Aggregation Is A Commodity, Filtering Is The Added-Value As we move toward a standardized way of presenting feed stories to aggregators, the value provided by the aggregators is essentially commoditized. Suddenly we will be able to choose any site on the web to aggregate all of our information but as many Facebook users are rapidly finding out, aggregating all that information can rapidly become inefficient. Many Twitter users experience the same “feed fatigue” that Facbeook users have experienced over the past week. “Feed fatigue” is synonymous with content overload and so far few systems have been developed to handle the problem. Previously, Facebook would automatically choose what stories to display. Now the most popular stories are displayed within the “highlights” section of the homepage. FriendFeed also provides an automated filtering system but so far, none of the companies have perfectly determined an automated system for finding what matters most to us. Gabe Rivera of Techmeme claims that no perfectly automated system can be developed. At the end, he suggests, there always needs to be some form of human interaction. To Gabe I would say: I agree but I don’t think it’s the editor. Instead, I think it’s the user that will provide the human interaction. So What’s The Solution To Aggregation? Whether it’s news about our friends and families or news about the world, there is still no perfect aggregator. If none of the systems developed so far are perfect at finding us all the relevant information we desire (e.g. we only need to visit one site to consumer all our information), what new models can be developed to handle this aggregation? Many believe that search is the ultimate aggregator. For example, Google should be able to theoretically display all the information we want at any given moment without even having to query it. This would be a perfect system but unfortunately it doesn’t exist and probably won’t for a long time. It is also aligned with the concept of the semantic web which is still a relatively distant idea since all web data is still not perfectly structured. I’ve been thinking more about feed aggregation recently and in my own opinion, having control of our filters is probably the most efficient way for the time being. When I reference filters, I don’t just mean “Friend Lists” and applications as Facebook currently provides. Instead I mean granular filters which include various sources, time stamps etc. Think of a stock screener but for general content. Every content item has a source, a date, an interest category or folksonomy, and other various types of meta-data. You could then filter that information based on a variety of factors which will be defined by the data set. At the end of the day, certain information has a different meaning for each consumer of that information. Rather than saying that there is one “true result” to a query, perhaps it’s better to let the users define how that query is structured in the first place, overtime building their own efficient filtering system (or aggregator). Would Users Take The Time To Build Their Aggregator? Many Facebook users that I’ve spoken with said that they took the time to vote on the various feed items that were displayed in their feed. In other words, they were willing to take the time to make the machine find more relevant information. If we assume that basic feed aggregation (content aggregation; the sum of which amounts to an entire “search index”) will become commoditized within a short period of time, isn’t it best that we begin spending time on developing efficient filtering systems for these aggregators? At the end of the day, value is maximized through more efficient custom filtering services that the users can participate in creating. That means we need the systems to make the results more efficient. Facebook currently provides basic features (you can add or remove individuals from your feed as well as filter by friend list) and Google includes a few as well (SearchWiki and our clicks on search results), but neither have gotten very far. I believe there should be much more user input in the search results including input into the filters that are being used. What do you think the next steps are for developing more efficient content discovery systems?

MySpace Adds Photo Editing via FotoFlexer Posted: 20 Mar 2009 08:05 AM PDT Going along with other MySpace efforts to keep users on the site, the social network has enabled photo editing directly from users’ photo albums. Powered by FotoFlexer, the new MySpace photo editing options are available now for U.S. members. This makes personalization of images even easier, and more accessible to users from within the MySpace portal. International roll-out is expected in the coming months. Promoting “creative freedom” the collaboration between MySpace and FotoFlexer allows users to do everything you’d expect from basic image editing to all-out bling. There are color effects, decoration options, distortion features, borders, and even wrinkle smoothers. Once a user has finished editing a given photo, it can be added to the respective album as a duplicate or replace the original photo. Given the necessity for MySpace to maintain users’ customization options as well as continue to grow traffic and membership levels in order to stay competitive, the addtion of FotoFlexer’s image-editing tools comes as little surprise. As MySpace’s parent company Fox Interactive Media had acquired photo-sharing site Photobucket well over a year ago, it’s actually a bit surprising that MySpace has taken so long to offer such integrated photo-editing options. FotoFlexer also powers Photobucket’s image-editing tools, so seeing the partnership between MySpace and FotoFlexer merely makes sense. While other forms of photo-sharing and editing have been integrated into MySpace due to Photobucket’s acquisition, we haven’t seen direct integration on this level yet. Most of the integration we’ve seen has been through the developers platform, which enabled applications such as Picnik to provide somewhat direct options for editing photos already present in a user’s album. Though MySpace’s open platform is still a relevant consideration for the continued growth of the company it’s also important for MySpace to further build out its direct features to users, especially if the features encourage longer sessions for members.

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MySpaceID Accesses Activity Streams, Tests on Yahoo Posted: 18 Mar 2009 12:07 PM PDT MySpace announced its plans for a more open ID approach to login and site interoperability late last year, and today a few new features that have been tacked onto MySpaceID are taking the company further in the open direction. The highlights of today’s announcement include extended functionality for MySpaceID, a new SDK for developers looking to integrate their own websites and applications into MySpace profiles, and testing for MySpaceID implementation on the Yahoo! homepage. For the new MySpaceID SDK, developers can access user activity streams, and incorporate seamless authentication for their sites and applications. Such an offering makes login, access and cross-site activity much easier for both users and developers, while encouraging the growth and adoption of more open standards. Granting access to a user’s activity stream also makes MySpace that much more competitive with Facebook and Twitter, giving users another channel for broadcasting communication as well as offering developers and brands another marketing tool for applications and campaigns. As MySpaceID is the company’s answer to Facebook Connect, there are a lot of similarities we’re seeing between the two offerings. While this can be looked at in a competitive sense, it’s also a necessary move for all the open platforms to succeed in the long run. The testing for MySpaceID’s integration with Yahoo is an interesting one, as it allows users to receive updates on friends within both networks directly in their Yahoo homepage experience. This seems to fit in with Yahoo’s long term goals overall, as it has also been making moves to make itself more open and accessible, bringing in content from other sites and networks while pushing out content as well. For Yahoo, much of the open platform efforts have focused on a user’s social network, which has a slightly different stance than other implementations we’ve seen on different networks.

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